accidental editor

The publisher mangles a line, misses a word, or drops a whole passage—still, is it better or worse?—and somehow it comes out whole.

passage lodged

We call them ‘passages’ in literature yet some lodge themselves inside of us for the remainder of our lives.

dog-ear bookmark

The dog-eared page could mark an important passage, a run of words to return to, or it could mean a stopping place, when then where the book was closed, set aside and never opened again.

worthy writer

When I come across a passage worth quoting, I’m content to be a scribe.

pass in silence

The message of that passage was that you could read the words a thousand times and still it would escape you.

hole cloth

A poem whole was impossible. Most passages came apart during reading. Even in the middle of a line he could lose his way and fall into fragment.

new poetry

To go back to that time when one was discovering a new passage, a new poet, almost every day.

words equal to life

A passage achieves quotation when there’s an equation between its words and experience.

underlined for naught

After so many years I turn to this page again without an inkling of what attracted me to underline a certain passage.

afterimage

A finely-rendered image leaves a faint afterimage flickering in the mind after the passage has been read.

poem made of poems

Reading the Classical fragments one is struck by the fact that any poem is perhaps no more than a conglomeration of smaller ‘poems’. The ideal would be that any passage excerpted from a poem could stand alone as a poem.